Exploring the ground zero of social media

It’s always a shock to talk to someone who isn’t terminally online. What, so you didn’t know about this obscure fandom slapfest a few days ago? You don’t understand this meme with “no words from the Bible” or “would kill a Victorian child” or whatever the kids are saying nowadays? You’re not caught up with Kanye’s beef with Pete Davidson?

Well, if you’re reading The Saratoga Falcon, I’ll assume you might be out of the loop (if you knew about the aforementioned drama, you’d probably be on TikTok right now). So first, a primer on a few social media websites.

 

Reddit

Reddit’s main selling point is the various subreddits, which function as insular communities: Rather than subscribing to or following individual people or accounts, as you would on YouTube or Instagram, you join subreddits, which are usually centered around individual topics ranging from games to world news. Unlike traditional social media accounts like Facebook, Reddit is generally anonymous; users are free to “upvote” and comment behind a digital username of their choosing, which has its pros and cons.

Subreddits like r/ApplyingToCollege are often a place to post memes (or repetitive questions) about, well, applying to college. The community has a new joke drama every year: Two years ago, it was “That One Kid” who tried to kiss his Yale interviewer who was giving him “The Look”; last year, it was the user u/DartmouthSimp, who made daily posts about hopefully getting into Dartmouth but ironically ended up getting accepted to Yale; and this year it was anthropomorphic fanfiction of colleges and asking your interviewer to take the Rice Purity Test. The subreddit format works well for smaller communities, like r/ClimbersCourt for Andrew Rowe’s books and r/MageErrant for John Bierce’s series. Both writers are active on the subreddits, which makes for easy communication with the authors about theories or updates. 

However, I tend to think of “main Reddit” — the largest, most popular subreddits as mostly composed of slightly balding 30- to 50 year-old men, twirling their fedoras and wielding katanas.

 

Tumblr

Tumblr is an old blogging website that isn’t as dead as it seems. It generally consists of quirky leftists and a few radical feminists (including TERFs — Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) and lots of fans for particular shows like “Supernatural,” “Doctor Who” and “Steven Universe.” Aside from art, it features short stories and lots of text-based posts, but it’s had its fair share of controversies. 

Take, for example, the Tumblr user who stole bones from graveyards to sell, or for my fellow APUSH students, bullying John Green (host for Crash Course US History) off of Tumblr.

 

Twitter

Twitter — I’m going to be honest, I never go on it except for looking at art. But from just my impressions, unlike the other two sites, where anonymity is standard, there are many interactions between famous people on Twitter. There’s polarized left and right factions, and they all hate each other, so the entire platform is constantly blowing up. At any point, the trending sidebar will have every recent controversy in the past 24 hours.

 

TikTok

TikTok — I can’t answer this one. Call me a boomer, but I have no idea what’s going on here either. Most of my exposure to TikTok trends is looking at an artist’s page on Spotify and going “Huh, this song has way too many plays. Must’ve blown up on TikTok.” It’s a video sharing site where people dance a lot. It’s also very definitely a Zoomer platform, mostly full of 12 to 22-year-olds. There are concerns over the website being owned by a Chinese company, meaning some data is stored and the algorithms work against certain groups of people; but to be honest, these issues apply to literally every single modern social media platform.

 

Social media choices

Popular memes tend to spread from site to site about as fast as COVID-19 among the unvaccinated. Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Tumblr and iFunny all have their unique post formats, so sometimes you’ll see some signs of an image circulating through various sites with all their unique identifiers on them: An Instagram meme page will have an image with a Reddit watermark “Posted in r/laughlaughfunny by u/reddituser,” but the Reddit post is a screenshot of an iFunny image of a Twitter user posting a Tumblr post.

It’s gotten to the point where there was a trend in Reddit for putting “watermarks” as a safeguard against stolen memes, which really is indicative of the superiority all social media site users feel over each other. Tumblr users, no matter how self-deprecating, will post about keeping influxes of TikTok users out, Reddit has a general loathing for “normies” that use Instagram and TikTok and I’ve genuinely never met a person who likes Twitter just because of how caustic it is.

Moral of the story: If you’re not drowned in the dark depths of social media, it’s probably best for you and your mental health to stay away. But if you ever meet a Victorian child …